My country's modern bearing industry began to sprout from the end of the Qing Dynasty, and after a long period of stagnation, it did not develop until after liberation. In 2018, my country's bearing industry has developed more than 1,400 enterprises above designated size, of which the annual output of rolling bearings is 21.5 billion sets and 6.18 billion sets are exported. The scale of my country's bearing industry ranks third in the world, with a market share of about 20% of the global market.
The ten years from the 1990s to the beginning of the 21st century was the stage of rapid development of my country's bearing industry. During this period, five industrial clusters were successively built in eastern Zhejiang, Yangtze River Delta, Wafangdian in Liaoning, Liaocheng in Shandong and Luoyang in Henan.
my country's bearing industry is developing rapidly, and it also has the same bottleneck as other industrial industries - big but not strong. China has long been the world's largest production and sales base in the field of medium and low-end bearings, but has little say in the field of high-end bearings. The international high-end bearing products and manufacturing technology are basically monopolized by Sweden, Germany, Japan and the United States. my country imports about 4 billion US dollars of bearings each year, of which 70% are civilian high-end bearings.
The development of bearings is inseparable from the development of bearing materials and precision manufacturing technologies.
1 Materials Technology
The steel used to make bearings is called bearing steel. Yin Ruiyu, a famous metallurgical expert and academician of the Academy of Engineering, once pointed out that "bearing steel used to make balls, cones, rods, and sleeves has different requirements for physical quality. The quality is bound to be questionable." Foreign companies have developed and applied different steel grades for bearing parts of different sizes and uses, while domestic bearing steels have a relatively single variety and cannot fully meet the manufacturing requirements of high-end bearings.
There are also mixed problems in the quality of steel. There are more than 20 steel enterprises in my country with bearing steel production capacity. Taking Xingcheng Special Steel as an example, its bearing steel has ranked first in the world in terms of production and sales of bearing steel for nine consecutive years, and has been exported to Sweden SKF, Germany SCHAEFFLER (FAG), Japan's NTN and other world-renowned bearing companies. It shows that the quality of my country's bearing steel products has been internationally recognized, and even reached the world's advanced level. A considerable number of enterprises, the quality of bearing steel products is unsatisfactory, and even some inferior products are fishing in troubled waters, disrupting the bearing steel market environment.
This is the current problem of the bearing steel industry.
2 Precision Manufacturing Technology
The advanced level of forming and processing technology of well-known foreign bearing companies is reflected in:
High degree of automation, automatic production lines are generally used, and equipped with online detection and automatic sorting to reduce human errors
High product consistency and high hardness uniformity after heat treatment
Pay attention to the surface microstructure
Precision technology tests the hardware equipment, artificial technology, and ingenuity of enterprises. The gap in my country's manufacturing technology is mainly reflected in high-precision processing equipment and process stability, testing and testing technology, data processing and accumulation, and digital modeling. and simulation analysis.
